From the Tramp to Trump: on sovereignty and screen comedy

In recent years, critics and scholars have anxiously observed that the subversive force of satire, jokes and gags on screen has become not only toothless, but positively exploited by populist leaders and political demagogues. From Silvio Berlusconi to Donald Trump, Boris Johnson to Jair Bolsonaro, the figures of the sovereign and the court jester have merged into what Michel Foucault, in a prescient, passing phrase, once called “grotesque sovereignty.” In this chapter, I build on Foucault’s concept to situate this recent entanglement of comic subversion and sovereign power within a wider genealogy of screen comedy. If sovereignty has, over the last century, become defined by a grotesque excess it has been, in large part, through the mediating power of screens, whether cinematic, televisual or viral, and which have produced, in turn, comic forms of satire and parody as inevitable blowback. Yet far from understanding sovereignty and comedy in opposed terms, I emphasise their shared status as states of exception in which sovereign and clown appear as inverted, reproducible images of one another. Emphasising this complicity of sovereignty and comedy, I begin by tracing the essential relationship between theories of sovereignty and theories of humor before turning to three case studies of grotesque sovereignty as it has been comically fictionalized on screen: Hollywood’s crazy dictator films of the early nineteen-thirties, the comedy of sovereignty’s media apparatus as portrayed in the works of Armando Ianucci and the sovereign’s double as embodied by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.